Various types of container closures have been developed and utilized by prior workers in the art. Simple closures such as threaded closures and snap-on closures have long been popular and have been in general use both in this country and in many other countries throughout the world. More recently, the need has arisen to develop more sophisticated container closures to guard against particular problems. For example, it has been found necessary to provide child-proof closures for certain types of medicines and other products which could be harmful to children to guard against the event that a child might be in a position to open the container during some unsupervised period. More recently, tamperproof closures have proved to be necessary to prevent unauthorized tampering with the contents of a container prior to use by anyone, child and adult alike.
Numerous attempts have been made in the field of tamperproof or child-proof container closures to develop suitable replaceable caps or closures for bottles containing medicines. In non-medicinal storage containers, it has long been known to use non-replaceable cap closures. Such closures have widely been employed in connection with soft drink bottles and beverage cans which are exemplary of this type of closure.
Previous attempts to design tamperproof closures have generally been directed to a type of closure which will be deformed or destroyed upon opening and such closures have been developed in an effort to prohibit tampering with the stored materials in the associated containers without being readily observable. However, the attempts of prior workers in the art in connection with tamperproof closures have generally resulted in a single service type of construction wherein the closure was not reusable to again close the container once the tamperproof construction had been disturbed. Despite all of the prior efforts of the workers in this field, the need remains to provide a simply constructed, inexpensive, and reusable tamperproof closure remains.